After four months of planning and over 500 emails, I am less than 48 hours away from the start of my 5,000 mile road trip!

I have created the AWS Road Trip site to give you the opportunity to follow my journey. I will be posting photos, videos, maps, and more as I make my way from Boston to Seattle, with Austin as the southern extreme and San Francisco to the west. The clever and generous folks at MapBox have created a very nice interactive map of my journey.

(Click on the map to visit the interactive version)

Of course, this map (and many other parts of my trip) are powered by AWS. To learn more about how EC2, CloudFront, S3, and the Simple Email Service work together to create beautiful maps, read Will White's post, How We Serve Faster Maps from MapBox.

The AWS Road Trip site is hosted in Amazon S3, with DNS provided by Route 53. Content is generated in Octopress and pushed to S3 using S3cmd (see the first post for more information). I will write more about my setup after I return from my trip.

Some of the user groups still have space available (again, see the first post for more information). If I am speaking in your city,sign up now in order to secure a spot for yourself. I have a fresh new presentation, hundreds of AWS T-shirts, some stickers, and some other goodies to distribute.

As much as I would like to, I won't have time for any other meetings along the way. If you'd like to meet me in person, plan on coming to the user group in your city. I hope to see you there!

Have you ever been to a Startup Weekend event? In the space of 54 hours starting on a Friday evening (here's a typical schedule), participants pitch business ideas, form teams, implement their ideas, and present their work before a panel of judges. Along the way there's time for some coaching and a quick lesson in how to give a pitch, but most of the time is reserved for flat-out working with your team. The events are a lot of fun, and a good way to see the entire business formation process on an accelerated timescale.

At the end of the event some of the teams remain intact and go on to turn their weekend project into a fully functional business. A number of companies, including Rover.com (dog boarding), Zaarly (local shopping), and Look.io (mobile chat, acquired by LivePerson) were built on AWS during past Startup Weekend events.

I am happy to announce that AWS is now a Global Technology Sponsor of Startup Weekend! I have to say that I am genuinely excited by this announcement. I've been to a couple of events and I've seen the process in action. The events attract an eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, developers, marketers, and so forth. Everyone participates; there's no "stand around and watch" option. The energy level is high and one-time strangers form into teams and do some awesome work together.

Every Startup Weekend participant will receive $100 in AWS credits that can be applied to an existing AWS account or used with a new account (create one here if you need one). These credits can be used for a wide variety of AWS services including EC2, S3, and DynamoDB and are valid for 12 months from the date of activation.

To learn more about the program, visit our new Startup Weekend and AWS page. Startup Weekend events are held in hundreds of locations around the world. Check out the events page for more information.

We were pleased to be able to sponsor the University Hacker Olympics event earlier this year. Held in San Francisco, the event attracted 100 student scholars from 25 universities. The students competed for a chance to win over $150,000 in travel and other prizes. As a platium sponsor, we provided AWS credits to all contestants, along with additional benefits for the winners. We also sent a team of AWS engineers to help the teams architect their applications. The students were happy to have this opportunity to work closely with their AWS mentors.

The
student scholars were excited about AWS technology right from the start and a
majority of the hack teams built their products on top of AWS. Amazon DynamoDB
was a featured service at the event. Our engineers led a deep dive session on DynamoDB showed the students how it lets them offload the administrative burden of operating
and scaling their NoSQL database to AWS.

My colleague Dave Schappell was there and introduces the promotional video:

Several
teams leveraged DynamoDB in their hacks and built products ranging from real
time voting apps capable of supporting real world scaling requirements to data
analytics tool that provided real time metrics on public transport systems.
Some of the teams that featured DynamoDB in their products include the
following:

Book Exchange - College textbooks trading portal that links up buyers and sellers of books based on the real time market value of the textbooks in the portal

PuzzleText - A mobile texting app with a twist. Users have to solve a puzzle before seeing the message.

Several of my colleagues on the AWS team are heading to South by Southwest (SxSW) this year. If you are planning to be there, they'd be overjoyed to meet you.

We have a booth, two AWS sessions, and some special events:

Amazon BoothThe AWS team will be at the Austin Convention Center during SxSW Interactive from March 10th - March 13th. Stop by our booth and learn more about how AWS can help you get started and grow fast with no upfront costs. There will be marketing and solutions architects on site to help you get the information you need to get started and grow. Our friends from Amazon Kindle will also be there and will be able to help you develop and distribute your apps through the Amazon Appstore for Android.

AWS SessionsAmazon.com CTO Werner Vogels will explore the new rules of application
architecture that power
resilient, adaptive, data-driven applications. He’ll discuss new
patterns of
architecting for lower cost, continuous deployment, and greater scale
used by
some of today’s hottest start-ups such as Pinterest, Animoto, Airbnb,
and
Instagram. Werner will deliver his talk in Salon JK of the Hilton Austin
Downtown (500 East 4th Street) on Monday, March 11th from 3:30 PM to
4:30 PM.

AWS Technical Evangelist Simone Brunozzi will lead the AWS Hacker School. Bring your laptop to this interactive session (install the AWS command line tools ahead of time and sign up for a free AWS account), learn how to quickly architect and optimize applications in the AWS
cloud. As an added bonus; attendees at Simone's session ("Building Sophisticated Apps") will receive an AWS t-shirt and $250 in AWS
credit. This session will take place in Salon C of the AT&T Conference Center (1900 University Ave.) on Saturday, March 9th from 3:30 PM to 6:00 PM.

Booth EventsJohn Densmore (former drummer and founding member of The Doors) will be signing his book. Riders on the Storm, on Sunday, March10th from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM.

Guy Kawasaki (Venture Capitalist and Apple Fellow) will be signing his new book APE on Monday, March 11th from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM.

Twilio will deliver a presentation titled How We Scaled our Cloud Services Globally With AWS on Monday, March 11th at 3:30 PM.

The AWS and Kindle teams will co-host a block party on Tuesday, March 12th from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM.

If you are a developer or a technical leader and you want to learn more about the AWS Cloud and how to put it to use, these free one-day events are for you. After a morning keynote by a senior AWS leader, you can choose from a number of breakout sessions on topics that will include AWS service overviews, deep dives, use cases, best practices for advanced users, and architecture.

Some of the Summits will be preceded by a day of Technical Bootcamps.
We're also debuting the AWS Cloud Kata (Japanese for "Form") events as
part of the Summits, a full day of live demos of the latest cloud
computing best practices, illustrated by live demos. The Katas are
designed for Start-up CTOs, developers, engineers, architects, system
administrators, and data scientists

The excitement is building for AWS re:Invent and I am looking forward to my trip to Las Vegas. I've got important information for attendees and for online viewers!

AWS re:Invent for AttendeesIf you will be heading to Las Vegas for the conference, here's what you need to know:

What to Bring -Be sure to bring your laptop, mobile device(s), cameras, and the like. Feel free to share you re:Invent experience with your online network - blog, take pictures, tweet (we suggest using #reinvent to tag), and so forth. Wear comfortable shoes, and stay hydrated (we'll make sure to keep you well-fed).

Scheduling - Visit the Session Builder (online or mobile) to see what's happening.

We're running over 150 sessions in 16 tracks, so choose with care. Use the session builder to create your schedule. Seating is first-come, first-serve so be sure to get to the room on time.

Keynotes - Plan to attend the three keynotes to hear from Andy Jassy, Werner Vogels, and Jeff Bezos. Andy will lead off on Wednesday. He'll talk about the latest news and AWS innovations and will be joined on stage by some of our customers and partners. Werner will speak about application architectures on Thursday. Later in the day, Werner and Jeff Bezos will conduct a fireside chat.

AWS Booth - Come to the AWS booth to talk to AWS staff including service team members, product managers, solution architects, and account managers. Bring your technical and business questions and we'll do our best to answer them for you.

Developer Lounge - Come to the Developer Lounge to hang out with other developers, write code, and to meet the AWS Developer Relations team (the guys and gals behind the AWS SDKs and tools).

Code Challenge - Starting at 11 AM on Wednesday and Thursday, we'll be posting a Code Challenge in the Developer Lounge and on the re:Invent Twitter feed. We'll post 6 challenges on Wednesday and another 5 on Thursday. Show off your knowledge of EC2, S3, and the other services and compete for Kindle Fires and other cool prizes.

AWS Live Stage - Eight stealth companies will be launching at re:Invent on the AWS Live Stage.

AWS Report -I will be interviewing guests on the Live Stage at 2 PM on Wedneday and Thursday. If you are interested in sitting down for a 5 to 7 minute inteview, send me some email (awsreport@amazon.com) ASAP. I will also be doing roving reports from the show floor and uploading them to our YouTube channel. Look for the crowd and the camera, and feel free to line up!

Hands-On Labs - Visit the AWS Hands-On Lab and take advantage of 16 unique self-paced labs. You'll get hands-on experience with AWS and will learn how to use it in a variety of situations. Each lab will take you about 1 hour and seating is limited to 150 attendees at a time. The AWS labs are hosted on qwikLab, which (of course) runs on AWS. Topics include creating EC2 resources, Auto Scaling, using Amazon RDS, bundling EBS-backed AMIs, and much more.

re:Play Party -Attend the re:Play party from 6 to 9 PM on Wedneday. Hang out in the Rock-n-Roll 80's lounge, play laser tag and retro arcade games, sing karaoke, get your party t-shirt, and more.

Feedback - We're already planning for next year's re:Invent. We are looking forward to your suggestions and your feedback.

AWS re:Invent for Online ViewersPlease don't feel left out if you can't make it to Las Vegas this year!

We're going to do our best to capture the excitement (and the content) of the event and make it available to you online. Here are some ideas for you:

Our customers are using these services to implement cloud-based backup, disaster recovery, and archiving for entire enterprises.

In order to help you make sense of all of these options and to give you a better sense of how AWS can help you, we have created a day-long event devoted to cloud storage for the enterprise.

The AWS Cloud Storage for the Enterprise event will take place on June 6th in New York, and will run from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM. In addition to keynotes from Stephen Schmidt (Vice President, Security Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer for AWS) and Matt Tavis (AWS Solutions Architect), you will get to hear directly from AWS customers. Stephen will focus on the all-important question of data security in the cloud, and Matt will discuss the ways in which the cloud is transforming the storage strategies that our enterprise customers are putting in to play.

They'll also coever some lesser-known topics such as cloud-as-a-tier, NAS-like functionality with the cloud, long term data archiving with high performance record retrieval, high speed data transfer in and out.

Executive SummaryBlock off November 27-29 on your calendar, book a flight to Las Vegas, and plan to spend three days at AWS re: Invent learning more about AWS from AWS engineers, architects, partners, and customers in over 100 sessions.

AttendAWS re: Invent is our inaugural conference for customers and partners. We'll take over the Venetian Hotel and have a great time, wrapping things up with a Global Block Party featuring superstar DJs from around the world.

Developers can attend language-specific getting started sessions along with advanced sessions that will cover architecture, monitoring, configuration management, and performance optimization. We'll be running an all-day Coding Challenge in the Developer Lounge with cool prizes and a chance to show us (and your peers) what you can do.

Start-ups can learn about best practices for architecture, scalability, and cost savings from many of the world's fastest growing internet start-ups. Stealth start-ups can launch in front of press, analysts, VCs, and the entire AWS community in our Launch Theater, where we'll also host the finale of the global AWS Start-Up Challenge.

Enterprise IT can attend getting started and advanced sessions, with a focus on migrations, operations, and security.

You'll also get to hear customers, partners, and AWS talk about the solutions and workloads that are of particular interest to you, whether you are interested in gaming, mobile, web, internal IT, disaster recovery, big data, HPC, or analytics.

ParticipateIf you have something you'd like to share with the AWS community -- perhaps a success story, some lessons learned, or some best practices -- submit your abstract and we'll do our best to find a spot for you.

Get Notified Registration will open up in June. In the meantime, mark your calendar, click here, enter your email address, and we'll let you know when you can register.

FinallyI want to emphasize that this is not going to be one of those stuffy vendor conferences. I don’t want to give away any secrets but you can rest assured that this is something you don’t want to miss.

We are planning to keep you well informed, well fed, entertained, and fully engaged for the duration of the conference. There will be a wealth of opportunities for you to learn more about AWS, forge some connections with the service teams, meet others in the community and see what they are up to. You might need a vacation after this – it is Vegas after all and Vegas (and the Cloud) never sleeps.

Stay tuned for more details, including the agenda, and see you in Vegas…

We held our first-ever AWS Summit in New York in early 2011 (I snapped the picture at right before the audience filed in for the keynote).

Due to the great response we received the first time, we're doing it again, this time bigger, louder, and with even more content.

After registering, you'll be able to stroll through the Cloud Solutions Expo to see what our partners are doing with AWS.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels will deliver the keynote talk, and you'll get to hear from AWS customers PBS and Pinterest.

After a networking lunch (and more time to visit the Cloud Solutions Expo), you can choose sessions from three parallel tracks (executive, technical, and solutions).

Later in the afternoon, you'll have an opportunity to hear from a selection of AWS partners, and the day will conclude with some more time for networking and a prize drawing.

The event is free but space is definitely limited so you'd better sign up today.

We haven't forgotten those who don't live in or around New York. We'll be holding similar summits in London, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Melbourne, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Seoul, Bangalore, and Sao Paulo in 2012. We'll update the AWS Summit 2012 page as soon as we finalize the dates and venues for these can't-miss events.

We launched Amazon DynamoDB with a live video feed that was very well-attended. If you didn't get a chance to watch at the time, you can do so now:

You may also enjoy this short video featuring Werner Vogels, James Hamilton, Dave Lang, and Swami Sivasubramanian:

The Introducing Amazon DynamoDB Webinar will take place on February 15th at 10:00 AM PST. Stefano Stefani (Principal Software Engineer) and Dave Lang (Product Manager) will be presenting and fielding questions from the audience.The webinar is free but you do need to sign up.